Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
> As compared to what? One of the most common "high functionality"
> shells is bash, but its syntax is quite, ahem, "squirrely", too --
> IMO, of course :)

I've used various command shells on different systems over the last 35
years, and CMD is one of the worst.  I particularly like the command shell
that came with Apollo Domain/OS.  I also used the Korn shell quite a bit on
various Unix systems.  I thought it's syntax was a little too "Unix" like,
with too many special characters, but I remember it being quite usable.  It
seems like it's more trouble to get the same thing done with CMD.

> You can't be serious... If that ever was an issue for you, the first
> page of Google hits when searching for "cmd.exe delayed environment
> variable extension" is full of information about how to solve your
> problem. (Check out the variable ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION.)

I didn't know about that.  Now that I know where to look it up, I found this
described in the SETLOCAL command.

That brings up another gripe with CMD: The documentation sucks.  I like to
RTFM before using something.  I have tried with CMD, but it's all a bunch of
disjoint help pages with it being very hard to get any kind of overview.
The documentation is OK for looking up specific things that you know to ask
about, but it's really bad for getting a introduction when you first start.
It's no wonder most people don't know all CMD can do, even those that have
tried.  Knowing the range of things that are possible is exactly why I like
to RTFM before starting.

> This is exactly what I'm talking about... even people who normally
> know their stuff seem to approach cmd.exe with a mindset of "it can't
> do it anyway (because command.com twenty years ago couldn't do it)"
> and won't even look whether it can do it.

No, it's more "it can't do it because I saw no mention of it after a
reasonable search".  For example, most shells let you get the output of a
program into a environment variable.  When I first started using CMD I found
it very frustrating that it couldn't do that.  I looked in all the obvious
places (you have to specifically look since there is no overview to read),
like the SET command, looked for "assignment", and the like.  A few years
later I accidentally noticed this can be done with the FOR command when I
was looking up how to do something unrelated.

Try just finding a list of the commands built into CMD.  The help gives you
a list of commands available in Windows, but I don't remember any list of
just the built in commands so that you can get a introduction and find
things like that.

> This is another example of what I'm talking about. There's no limit
> of 9 command line arguments. (Check out the command shift.)

Yes you can do that, but that's more a workaround for the limit.  In better
shells you don't have to do that.


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